"whereis" locks up

[markusbkk]

I think this might be an inherent issue with the reliance on FUSE, but running something like whereis go locks up the shell. The longer it runs, the more it locks it up and the harder it is to kill the process.

[stapelberg]

You can run it under strace to see what’s going on:

strace -fvy whereis go

It seems like the whereis program starts searching /src at some point, which is a mountpoint that is backed by lazily downloading distri packages over the internet. For example, to see the source of whereis, you can cat /src/util-linux-amd64-2.32.1-7/misc-utils/whereis.c

I assume that your system is slowing down the more packages are being downloaded/mounted. It might be that resources aren’t freed quickly enough (or at all) in some places in the code.

I haven’t looked in more detail at this. Perhaps there is a way to configure whereis (or other parts of the system) to prevent this.